Lucky Number Music

London collective HMLTD (Henry Spychalski, Duc Peterman, Andrei Martynchyk, Theo Spark) today announce their new album FANGS, which will be released on October 23rd. They also today share new single “I Used To Ride In Limousines” which is accompanied by a stunning new video, once again directed by frontman Henry Spychalski.

Of new single “I Used To Ride In Limousines”, HMLTD say –

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. This is a song about failure and success. It’s about making peace with failure, finding liberation in the sovereign, non-productive waste of failure, and about rejecting all instrumentalist notions of ‘success’ that subjugate life and the human experience itself to ‘success’ as an end goal. It’s about rejecting the ego, and it’s about rediscovering and redefining a sense of self-worth that is entirely one’s own”

On their third album, FANGS, HMLTD have created an entirely new genre: Götherdammerüng (or ÜberGöth). Predictably unpredictable, it could not be further away from their last outing, 2023 rock opera The Worm. The sixteen-piece orchestra has been traded in for Ableton, the timpani and violins replaced with side-chained four-to-the-floor and rave synths, and the gospel choir swapped for guttural gothic howling and black metal screams. The result is both unique and terrifying: a total reinvention and rehabilitation of the goth genre, through the looking glass of modern electronic and doomscroll-era dance music.

This new beginning was accompanied by a change in personnel, with Theo Spark and Andrei Martynchyk joining the fray alongside original members Henry Spychalski and Duc Peterman. Decamping to a ruined château in the Loire Valley, the quartet became obsessed with vampire lore, and the EBM and goth sound that inspired their early work: Fad Gadget, DAF, Nitzer Ebb, Suicide and Bauhaus. FANGS also points to more contemporary influences like Crystal Castles, German hardcore, 2000s blog-house a la Justice, and 2020s sleazepop.

The world crafted in FANGS is full of cosmic pessimism, glowing horror, imperceptible evil and digital dismemberment, ancient curses and ruined castles, Vampires. But it is also a thoroughly fun, and funny, record, as danceable as it is deep. Born of the club, some tracks would not sound out of place on Brat. Like a Smiths song which sounds happy and carefree until your brain tunes in to the misery of the lyrics, it can be listened to – and enjoyed – on two levels. One can get lost in the throb of bass and ludic synths, or tune into the horror of the lyrics which overlay them.

FANGS attempts to offer up a reflection to a culture that – like a Vampire – has lost its own. The result is something not only thoroughly modern, original and inventive – but that feels genuinely dangerous and potent. FANGS delights in this ambiguity: simultaneously indicting decadence, decay and moral rot, while luxuriating in its intoxication by it. Cacophonous sub-bass becomes a chthonic call of the void; seraphic rave synths become the screech of valkyries; four-to-the-floor becomes a deathly funeral march. Vampire apocalypse.

Additionally, following their forthcoming sold out show at Club Cheek, the band also today reveal details of their next London headline show at Village Underground on March 4th 2027. They will also be playing at the Arise festival: Berlin edition, presented by Fetchish, this coming November 7th.

London collective HMLTD (Henry Spychalski, Duc Peterman, Theo Spark, Andrei Martynchyk) today return with new single “Blitzkrieg” – their first new music since the critically acclaimed 2023 album, The Worm.

Mixed by Nicos Kennedy (Machine Girl, Femtanyl), “Blitzkrieg” is an abrasive and confrontational thrill ride before collapsing into its melancholic coda; the band continue to delight in confounding listener expectations whilst at a new forefront of experimental and ground-breaking music. The accompanying video delights in exploring the new visual identity which the band inhabits.

On “Blitzkrieg”, HMLTD say –

“Blitzkrieg is our first single in three years, and a reinstatement of intent and the values which defined our early manifesto: it is a return to radical experimentation, violent confrontation, and music as revolt.”

Born in the club, Blitzkrieg is the clarion call of a new sound, which the band call GÖTHERDÄMMERUNG, or ÜberGöth. In the cybernetic sprawl of AI, hyperreality and techno-capital acceleration, GÖTHERDÄMMERUNG is a form of gothic insurrection which resurrects the ghosts that modernity attempted to bury: plague pits, witches, ruined castles, vampires, as a means of understanding and mapping the new demons created by capital.

They will perform an underplay at Club Cheek, London on October 26th – tickets on sale now – with more dates to be announced imminently.

Today, London collective HMLTD have unveiled a new video for “Days“, taken from their widely acclaimed new album The Worm, described as “a triumph of ambition” by The Sunday Times, and “One of the most well-executed concept albums of recent times” by Loud & Quiet. The video arrives ahead of two special performances at London’s ICA this week (18th & 19th May), where the band will perform The Worm in full for the very first time.

The band have also confirmed two hotly-tipped special guests for their upcoming live performances – Heartworms (18th May) and Picture Parlour (19th May) – tickets are on sale now.

Born of his “failure to accept the impermanence of things”, ‘Days’ finds frontman Henry Spychalski detailing love and loss, memory and melancholia, and time and its unravelling – as he explains: “In “Days”, the Worm that stalks the album takes on a new, particular meaning – as that kernel of doubt which, like a parasite, can burrow in and bury itself inside a relationship – growing inside its warmth until finally it overcomes it.”

The song’s accompanying video, directed by Spychalski, is in part an homage to Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée, transplanted into the world of The Worm.

Ahead of the arrival of their new album – The Worm – due this Friday, 7th April, London collective HMLTD have today shared the record’s title track, “The Worm“.

Conceptually and musically, “The Worm” is the centrepiece of the band’s new full length. It’s the clearest distillation of its two major themes: the powerlessness of individuals stuck and suffering inside systems of power that they are unable to change, and the spiritual struggle to overcome one’s inner demons.

“‘The Worm’ is by far and away the most ambitious song we’ve made to date,” tells frontman Henry Spychalski. “We recorded it with a 16-piece string orchestra in Athens and, later, a small gospel choir in London. It was inspired by Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’. For the cacophonous outro which closes the song, we asked the orchestra to play the part with the ‘sensazione de un verme’ (the sensation of a worm). The lyrics are the clearest admission that the album is a symbol of my depression and battle with it.”

The track arrives alongside a new video directed by Spychalski. Set in Wyrmlands, the imagined future in which The Worm has swallowed England and society is split between those who support it, and those who have chosen to resist.

“The video for ‘The Worm’ shows the final stand of the resistance,” notes Henry. “We shot the video in an abandoned, desecrated church in London’s East End to emphasise the spiritual nature of the song and its themes of struggle and salvation. In the video, I wanted to show man’s inner demons physically manifested as real, living, breathing entities – the Worm within man.

It was inspired by the films of the polish auteur Andrzej Zulawski, and in particular his unfinished masterpiece On The Silver Globe. The chorus of extras which make up the congregation are all fans of ours who answered a general callout on Instagram, without whom the video would not have been possible – so our eternal gratitude to them here cannot be overstated”

In coordination with the Worm Moon, London collective HMLTD have today shared “The End Is Now” and its accompanying video, the second single to be taken from their ambitious second album The Worm, due Friday 7th April.

Continuing a push in sonic experimentation, “The End Is Now” combines 70’s soul with English folk to set the scene for The Worm, evoking the apocalyptic zeitgeist of the 21st Century and a generation’s psychological terror at the threat of world-ending climate change. “‘The End Is Now’ tells of how the titular Worm was finally awoken by hydraulic fracking of the English countryside, and swallows England whole” explains frontman Henry Spychalski. “The Worm here is both a metaphor for capitalist greed, and the embodiment of a whole generation’s anxiety, dread and fear in the face of ever-looming apocalypse and world-ending natural disasters.”

Directed by Spychalski, the accompanying video for ‘The End is Now’ was visually inspired by the films of Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Václav Marhoul’s film The Painted Bird and acts as an origin story for the album’s hero.

The new cut follows “Wyrmlands” in affirming HMLTD as one of the UK’s most ambitious and creative talents. Created over the course of two years with a cast of 47 musicians – including a gospel choir and a 16-piece string orchestra – the collective’s second full-length The Worm is less a concept album than a fully-fledged musical universe, transcending genre and medium. Set in a disorienting anachronistic version of Medieval England – as steeped in dystopian sci-fi fantasy as it is folklore and Old English mythology – it’s part political polemic, part deeply moving psychological journey.